What Gravity Holds
Words by Carmen F. de Terenzio
this violent principle in a violent way, 2026. Photo by Oriol Tarridas.
Courtesy of Luna Palazzolo-Daboul and Primary.
When I visited “Of Ivory & Flesh” at Primary, the gallery was silent. In daylight, Luna Palazzolo-Daboul’s four large sculptures, which make up the show, occupied an austere field of gray: concrete beads and galvanized pipe against the gray floor and walls. There was little to distract the eye. Nothing appeared to move, yet it was difficult to think of these objects as entirely still. Their tension could be felt. Two sculptures stand on the floor, and two are suspended. The difference alters our perception of the same materials. The standing works expose their metal structures, which appear to brace themselves beneath the strands of concrete. Pipes protrude at angles; beads are slung over frames and gather in heavy coils on the floor. In the work titled “this violent principle in a violent way,” several strands are pulled into a large knot.
Knotting is a familiar gesture, but it is difficult to reconcile with concrete, a material we understand as hard and unyielding. In “The will attached to some obligation and a bad desire,” the intersecting pipes evoke a cross. The beads recall a rosary in a hand, passing through the fingers one by one. The intimate scale of devotion has been multiplied until it seems to acquire physical weight. Standing before these sculptures, I thought of carrying one’s cross, and of a surrender that is not collapse but endurance: a structure bracing itself beneath an unyielding weight. The suspended sculptures feel different. Their long, vertical strands resemble curtains, or veils, or garments. They seem lighter, even feminine, despite being made from the same concrete.
In “y nos comunicamos por el mismo muro que nos separa,” strands descend from a circular metal structure and loosen as they reach the floor. Gravity determines its form, yet there is grace in the descent. In “A painting to hammer a nail in (paraphrasing),” the strands narrow as they converge at a single nail, then fall and coil on the floor. That so much can be held by one point of support heightens the delicacy of the form. What looks soft remains hard. The exhibition draws on Simone Weil, for whom gravity reaches beyond the physical world to become a way of thinking about necessity and the limits imposed on human existence.
Her thinking about equilibrium offers another way to consider the sculptures: apparent stillness can be the result of opposing forces held in balance. The longer I looked at her sculptures, the harder it became to understand their stillness as rest. Each bead is solid and inflexible, but, strung together, they become unexpectedly pliant. Using concrete in unusual ways is not, in itself, new. What I find compelling is how the artist makes force perceptible through form. The scale makes the labor hard to ignore. Each bead was individually cast and assembled — labor that moves the object from the intimacy of the hand into a shared space. From across the gallery, the strands appear continuous; up close, the individual beads return. The titles of the works speak of violence, obligation, and desire. At times, I wanted some release from all that weight. Yet, the sculptures themselves seem softer than their titles suggest.
Initially, I had understood balance as a point at which opposing forces come to rest. The trace these works left was gentler: they made me wonder whether balance might also mean allowing those forces to be.